In TNG, Picard says that the Federation has evolved past a need for money. Indeed, we never see any.
In DS9 though, Quark talks a lot about bar tabs and costs. Surely OāBrien and Bashir donāt get free drinks, so how do they pay? Iād assume that any Ferengi worth his lobes wonāt accept anything that can be replicated, so do Federation officers get a stipend of tradeable āvalueā when interacting with cultures that still expect payment?
I think thereās also a reference to Quark paying rent to Sisko for running the bar. Presumably thatās denominated in latinum. I wonder where it goes? Maybe the secret āGarak black opsā fund.
I mean, on a molecular level there is no difference. I feel like they even did the whole ship of Theseus thing several times. And the obvious one is the 2nd Riker. Enterprise (the series, not the ship) saw the addition of transporters to starships and they talked about it a lot in that episode. Bones in the original refused to use them because he understood the science of it and knew people were essentially being killed and reassembled every time they were transported.
I always got the impressions that people who said non-replicated food tasted better were either deluding themselves or that extra flavor they attribute to the food is like, non food things in it. Leftover dirt, mold starting to growā¦ Kind of like how completely filtered water is tasteless when the minerals and other fine particulates are removed. Transporters, as a side effect of how they work, remove illnesses from the body (Except when it needs to not for plot reasons. And donāt get me started on the billions of bacteria that exist in our body all the time that are necessary for life that wouldnāt count as āyouā). So presumably, they would remove all those tiny things in food if transported, and obviously wouldnāt create them in the first place if replicated.
Thatās something I hadnāt considered about replicated food. As a gardener, I can attest that the dirt itās grown in can have a pretty big impact on taste. It could be that.
Could also be, like, you order your replicated tomato, and theyāre giving you Tomato variety number 7, as is standard for replicators, and you just donāt care for that variety. Kinda like how banana candy doesnāt taste like bananas, because it actually tastes like a variety of banana you canāt get anymore, so no one thinks it tastes real anymore.
Doctor McCoy used the transporter very frequently with minimal complaining; the only complaint I can recall is from TMP and followed a horrific and unexpected transporter accident.
As for transporters in Enterprise, two things are especially noteworthy: one, they explicitly refuted the idea that the transporter creates a āsome sort of weird copyā of the person or object transported, and two, those human-safe transporters were contemporary with very primitive replicator equivalents called protein resequencers. Clearly transporters arenāt building humans atom-by-atom from data alone if they canāt figure out how to do more than resequence protein molecules in any other context.
Transporters donāt do anything to affect the matter they are transporting unless explicitly intended to: by the 24th century they are programmed to filter out recognizeable pathogens, and can be used to deactivate weapons or occasionally monkey with the genes of a person in mid-transport, but things routinely pass through the transporter without issue which are either totally unknown or explicitly non-replicatable. None of this makes sense if the sequence is scan -> destroy -> rebuild, but makes total sense if the transporter is shifting the transportee into subspace (with some tweaks to allow them to exist there) and then back out of subspace at the destination.
Thomas Riker (and now William Boimler) is the one big exception. Both occured under a very specific and extremely rare weather condition, and the first time this happened the Chief Engineer on the flagship of the Enterprise was shocked that such a thing was even possible. Iām much more inclined to believe that the ātransporter duplicatesā are actually the result of the phenomenon that duplicated Voyager in Deadlock, not the transporter actually constructing two people from the pattern and matter of only one.